Loquendo TTS at the Service of Dortmund Firefighters

DORTMUND, Germany - On December 7 and 8, 2004 in Dortmund, Germany, the kick-off meeting of the European project "Share" was held.

The "Share" project develops a Push-To-Share advanced mobile service that will provide critical multimodal communication support for emergency teams, such as firefighters, during rescue operations. It will combine advanced, innovative technologies to allow mobile workers to communicate naturally and bi-directionally, and to share structured multimodal information resources, including audio, video, text, graphic and location information. The first release of this project will be tested by the Dortmund firefighters.

The text-to-speech technology for accessing textual information is provided by Loquendo. The Loquendo TTS will be integrated in the Push-to-Share architecture and will be optimized on the application domain. The focused language will be German, for which a special tuning will be performed to obtain pronunciation, e.g. of street names in the car navigation system for firefighters. Prosodic and acoustic processing will also be experimented in order to ensure intelligibility and effectiveness of the synthetic voice in the difficult and noisy conditions prevailing during rescue operations.

Loquendo is one of the partners of this project, which involves universities and companies of several countries (Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Greece).